PRC police ask woman to axe White House petition

AP, BEIJING

Upset about plans for a petrochemical plant near her hometown in China, a woman turned to a new method that Chinese are using to air their complaints — she posted a petition on the White House’s Web site. Then, Chinese police asked her to remove it.

Last week’s run-in with internal security agents turned into an unexpected lesson for the woman.

“I didn’t think [the petition] was a big deal and didn’t foresee the ensuing events,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by the initials she used on the petition, B.Y., for fear of further angering the police.

B.Y., who is in her late 20s and works in the finance industry in the central city of Chengdu, said the officers asked her on Friday last week to delete the petition from the White House open petition site.

Set up in 2011, the “We the People” site allows the public to directly petition the White House, but she said she discovered the site does not allow people to remove petitions, so she was unable to comply.

The Chengdu police department declined to comment.

B.Y.’s petition problem, which was first reported by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, shows how prickly Chinese authorities are about Internet dissent.

Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, has been on edge over plans to build a petrochemical plant 40km northwest of the city. The plant is expected to produce 10 million tonnes of oil and 800,000 tonnes of ethylene per year.

Residents are concerned that the plant, operated by state-owned PetroChina, will aggravate air and water pollution, and question its safety because it is near a seismic fault where two deadly earthquakes have occurred in the past five years.

Authorities thwarted a planned demonstration over the plant last Saturday by filling the streets with police for a supposed earthquake drill and have censored discussions of protest on the Internet.

At about the same time, Chinese netizens discovered that the White House petition Web site was beyond the censors’ reach.

Discussions about an unsolved case involving the poisoning of a university student named Zhu Ling (朱令) in Beijing 18 years ago were being deleted from Chinese sites, so someone turned to the White House site. In a few days, a petition calling for an investigation of a suspect living in the US gathered 100,000 online signatures — the threshold for an official White House response — and kept the discussion alive in China.

B.Y. said she went to the White House Web site to sign the petition for Zhu. Then, she saw she could start her own petition as well.

“So, I wrote about Chengdu,” B.Y. said in an interview conducted by instant message.

Her petition, posted in English on Tuesday last week, notes public concern about the project, and urges the international community to evaluate the plan and monitor its environmental impact.

The next day, she received a call from domestic security personnel.

“I got a shock today,” she wrote on her Sina Weibo microblog.

Two days later, she met with officers at a police station near her workplace.

“I will be out to have some tea,” she wrote on Friday last week. “If I should not return in two hours, please report me as missing.”